Beauty and the Beast: Venice and the Rhino A Symposium Saturday, 24 November 2018

PROGRAM A world without rhinos and a world without Venice is unimaginable. And yet both Venice and the Rhinoceros have become victims of their desirability and objectification as luxury objects – both consumed without discrimination by an ever- expanding consumer class.

This shimmering city and magnificent beast might seem an unlikely pairing. However, not only are both threatened with extinction in the face of unfettered consumption, but the rhinoceros is embedded emblematically in the city: Marco Polo provided one of the earliest descriptions of the Sumatran rhinoceros; a rhino is portrayed in an ancient mosaic in the heart of the city’s basilica; and a visiting rhinoceros to the city is commemorated in a famous eighteenth-century painting by one of Venice’s great artists.

The symposium brings together an international group of artists, conservationists, poets, writers, and historians, who together will explore the often surprising intersections between these two endangered objects of mass luxury consumption. The recent and artificial construction of rhino horn as a unique object of desire will be placed within its longer history; the tale of Clara the rhino in Venice will be elucidated; the artists contributing to the exhibition will be introduced; and the complex threads involved in the mass tourism market of Venice with its destructive consequences on one of the world’s most beautiful of cities will be unraveled.

Catherine Kovesi Organiser and Curator emporium.org.au

This free and public symposium, which contextualises and launches the accompanying exhibition ‘Rhinoceros: Luxury’s Fragile Frontier’, examines the paradoxical magnificence and fragility of both Venice and of the Rhinoceros.

SYMPOSIUM 24 November, 2018 Palazzo Contarini Polignac

EXHIBITION 24 November - 21 December, 2018 Magazzino Gallery, Palazzo Contarini Polignac Registration is required to attend the symposium Symposium Program and place numbers are limited. Register via Eventbrite: eventbrite.com.au > beauty-and-the- beast-venice-and-the-rhino-a-symposium

09.30 Registration and Coffee

Bikem de Montebello Welcome to the Palazzo Contarini Polignac 10.15 Managing Director, Palazzo Contarini Polignac

Ronna Bloom The Night the Rhinos Came: Poems of Fragility I 10.30 Poet in Residence, Sinai Health Toronto

Catherine Kovesi Introduction. Luxury’s fragile frontiers + how a symposium 10.45 University of Melbourne came about…

Jane Da Mosto Venice: A Fragile and Resilient City 11.15 Executive Director, We are here Venice

11.45 Coffee Break

Lynn Johnson Reinventing Magnificence: status from contribution 12.15 Founding Director, Nature Needs More

12:45 Lunch Break

Ronna Bloom The Night the Rhinos Came: Poems of Fragility II 13.45 Poet in Residence, Sinai Health Toronto

Glynis Ridley Keynote. One of a Kind: Clara the Rhinoceros in eighteenth- 13.50 University of Louisville century Venice and the tale of a missing horn

Sophie Bostock Clara in Qatar: The story of a Meissen porcelain 14.45 Orientalist Museum, Qatar

Bruno Martinho Rhino horns and scraps of unicorn: The sense of touch 15.00 European University Institute and the consumption of rhino horns in early modern Iberia

15.30 Coffee Break

Catherine Kovesi Gigi Bon: Her Oeuvre, her Wünderkammer, and how Venice 16.00 (with Gigi Bon) became a Rhino

Sabrina Ardizzoni Shih Li-Jen: His Oeuvre, and his vision of the rhino and 16.30 University of Bologna unfettered consumption

Ronna Bloom The Night the Rhinos Came: Poems of Fragility III 17.00 Poet in Residence, Sinai Health Toronto

17.30 Drinks and a Vernissage Rhinoceros: Luxury’s Fragile Frontier Welcome to the Palazzo 10.15 Contarini Polignac. Winnaretta – Edmond and Love for Venice

Bikem de Montebello Biography

Managing Director Bikem de Montebello has degrees in Political Science from Palazzo Contarini Polignac Bosphorus University, and in Fashion from Parsons School of Design in Paris. She completed her Masters in International The American-born Winnaretta Singer (1865-1943), Relations at Johns Hopkins University SAIS Bologna Center, daughter of Isaac Singer (inventor of the mass-produced and has a MSc in Luxury Management from Sup de Luxe, sewing machine), married Prince Edmond de Polignac, a Paris. She worked for many years marketing cosmetics, in composer of music, in 1893. In 1900 Winnaretta bought the international brand management and product development fifteenth-century Palazzo Contarini, on the Grand Canal, as a for brands/companies such as Nivea, La Prairie, Lancôme birthday gift for Edmond and hence the Palazzo’s combined and Biotherm in Paris, Zurich, and Hamburg. She has taught name - Contarini Polignac. Living between Venice and the history of fashion at Esmod fashion school and Bilgi Paris, Winnaretta was a well-known patron of the arts, University, Istanbul. Currently she is managing a fifteenth- sciences, and letters, first together with her husband, and, century palazzo, Palazzo Contarini Polignac, in Venice. after his death in 1901, continued to use her fortune to benefit these fields. In her welcome address, Bikem will briefly outline Winnaretta’s extraordinary contributions to the cultural life of the city of Venice and the ways in which this palace was to become an indispensable and very active outpost of her salon in Paris, a celebration of her love for Edmond and their mutual love for Venice – the fragile city.

For more www.palazzocontarinipolignac.com/ Introductory: Luxury’s 10.45 fragile frontiers + how a symposium came about

Catherine Kovesi Biography

Organiser and Curator Catherine Kovesi is an historian of early modern Italian University of Melbourne History at the University of Melbourne, with an especial research focus on debates surrounding luxury consumption This symposium and accompanying exhibition were born in the early modern world. In 2013-15 she was an from a series of wondrous encounters in the city of Venice international partner in the Leverhulme Trust-funded and beyond with three remarkable people: the Venetian research network: ‘Luxury and the Manipulation of Desire: artist Gigi Bon, the Taiwanese artist Shih Li-Jen, and the Historical Perspectives for Contemporary Debates’. Her British-born Australian-based wildlife conservationist Lynn forthcoming edited book Luxury and the Ethics of Greed in Johnson. In this paper I outline these encounters and the Early Modern Italy (Brepols, 2018) derives from this research ways in which all three protagonists through their divergent collaboration. She has published widely on sumptuary law, on work interrogate a burning issue of our day, namely the luxury consumption in Italy more broadly, and on the social, impact of unregulated desire and consumption on two of political and religious life of Florence and Venice in particular. our most ancient and seemingly enduring world treasures: She is currently working on the spending habits, and artistic the 1500-year-old city of Venice and the 50 million-year- and religious patronage networks of the seventeenth- old rhinoceros. Both this beautiful city, and this mighty beast century Venetian Doge Leonardo Donà dalle Rose. She has share an unexpected dilemma of fragility in the modern age been bringing students from the University of Melbourne to of consumption, and both are facing grave threats to their Venice since 2007. longevity. Luxury has a long and not entirely reputable past, and this paper also outlines this longer history of luxury, and that of its more distinguished counterpart - magnificence. These two concepts in the longue durée provide the context for the rich and varied papers and interventions for the day.

For more https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu. au/display/person4916 10.30 The Night the Rhinos 13.45 Came: Poems of Fragility, 17.0 0 I + II + III

Ronna Bloom Biography

Poet in Residence, Sinai Ronna Bloom is the author of six books of poetry. Her most Health; Poet in Community, recent book, The More (Pedlar Press, 2017) was longlisted for the 2018 City of Toronto Book Award. Ronna’s poems University of Toronto have been recorded by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, translated into Spanish and Bengali, and have been For this project in Venice, Ronna will write and present used in the work of filmmakers, doctors, academics, spiritual poems that reflect on fragility, loss, and the possibilities leaders, and architects. of contact, empathy, and salvage through presence. Ronna is currently Poet in Community at the University of Toronto and Poet in Residence in the Sinai Health System. In these roles, she offers health care professionals, students, patients, and visitors opportunities to articulate their experiences through writing and poetry. Her Spontaneous Poetry Booths and Prescriptions for Poetry have appeared in hospital waiting rooms, bookstores, fundraisers and arts events in Canada and abroad.

Since Ronna’s first visit in 2015, she has returned to Venice four times, feeling an urgency to understand and connect to the place through writing and presence.

For more https://ronnabloom.com Venice: A Fragile 11.15 and Resilient City

Jane da Mosto Biography

Executive Director, we are Jane da Mosto trained as an environmental scientist here Venice (MA, Oxford University, M. Phil. Imperial College London) and gained international experience as a consultant on Venice is a paradoxical city built right in the middle of sustainable development. After working in London in a dynamic and unstable coastal lagoon system yet it management consultancy and venture capital, Jane joined the has flourished and retained some vital features since its environmental economics group at the Fondazione Eni Enrico origins more than a thousand years ago. The survival of Mattei in Milan in 1992. Since moving to Venice in 1995, she the city is intricately connected with the wellbeing of the has worked continuously and variously: European Projects lagoon system. for local NGOs; Agenda 21 for Venice Municipality (1999); a review of climate change research in Italy for the International The lagoon’s integrity, however, is being undermined Geosphere-Biosphere Programme/Consiglio Nazionale di by incompatibilities in the institutional framework, lack Ricerca (2000); the Venice in Peril Fund/Cambridge University of a longer term strategy for urban development, over five-year study “Flooding and Environmental Challenges for dominant economic interests. Rising waters, in the face Venice and the Lagoon” (2001-6) and the Venice Report on of global climate change, are contrasted with falling demography, change in use of buildings, public finances and numbers of permanent residents and disappearing tourism (2009); the OECD Territorial Review of Venice (2010); features of a living city. muf/British Council installation in the British Pavilion at the 2010 Architecture Biennale and LagunaViva with assemble This paper argues that Venetians must be central to collective for the VAC Foundation in 2018 as well as organising plans to protect and reclaim the city from the ravages and participating in grass roots interventions. She co-founded of mass tourism and if we succeed in saving Venice, the ‘We are here Venice’ (WahV) in 2012, an independent non- world will understand better how to save itself. profit organisation addressing Venice’s challenges as a living city, which advocates evidence-based approaches to policy making and delivers projects and recommendations based on rigorous research to bring about real changes according to social, economic, physical and ecological indicators.

For more https://weareherevenice.org/ Reinventing 12.15 Magnificence: status from contribution

Lynn Johnson fragile heritage. In other words, enabling and encouraging elites to derive status from contribution to nature; for Founding Director, Nature conservation to become the new black. Needs More

The desire for rare wildlife ‘products’ as emblems of status is Biography increasing rapidly in new consumer markets. Illegal trafficking A scientist by education (with a PhD in particle physics), Lynn of wildlife and timber is now the world’s fourth largest Johnson’s professional experience has been in the areas transnational crime. Criminal syndicates have moved beyond of executive coaching, commercial strategy and corporate simply exploiting the existing demand to manufacturing culture change. Through the Australian charity she co- new markets using the same principles luxury goods founded, Nature Needs More, Lynn uses her experience manufacturers have used for decades to trigger desire and in driving behaviour change to create demand reduction purchasing decisions. Battling this trend requires a different campaigns. Her major project is changing the purchasing approach to the traditional conservation methods. behaviour of the primary users of rhino horn in Viet Nam. Since 2015 she has researched the luxury industry focusing My work, and that of Nature Needs More, underscores on re-inventing Magnificence as part of these broader an innovative ‘demand reduction’ approach to wildlife behaviour change strategies. conservation. It is consumers of exotic wildlife ‘products’ who drive the illegal poaching and unsustainable harvesting She has been on the sub-committee of the SAVE African of many species. Nature Needs More combines demand Rhino Foundation since 2014 and has travelled to a number reduction campaigns in South East Asia with work to revive of African and Asian countries as part of her conservation the ancient idea of Magnificence, a concept subverted by efforts. Lynn lives just outside Melbourne, on a 20-acre luxury in recent centuries. This paper outlines my research property, which provides a sanctuary for local wildlife and proposed mechanisms by which we can provide elites including echidnas, kangaroos, wallabies, koalas and a with an alternative to fulfil their self-image and status needs multitude of very noisy Australian birds. based on contribution to, instead of consumption of, our most

For more https://natureneedsmore.org One of a kind: Clara the 13.50 rhinoceros in eighteenth- century Venice and the tale of a missing horn

Glynis Ridley Biography

University of Louisville Glynis Ridley is a graduate of the universities of Edinburgh and Oxford and is now a Professor and Chair of the In 1741, a Dutch sea captain succeeded in transporting a live Department of English at the University of Louisville, female Indian rhino calf from north-east India to his home Kentucky, USA. She is an eighteenth-century specialist town of Leiden. Named “Clara,” she was only the fifth Indian by training and stumbled into researching the European rhinoceros to be seen on European soil since the fall of the reception of the rhinoceros when she chanced upon an Roman empire and the only rhinoceros on the continent in engraving in an early anatomical atlas, and wondered why the mid-eighteenth century. From 1741-58, Douwemout the engraver had bothered to include a rhinoceros in the Van der Meer displayed Clara across Europe to commoners picture. Learning that, from the fall of the Roman empire until and kings. In 1751, Van der Meer brought Clara to Venice, to the 1800s, only eight live Indian rhinoceroses had been seen show her during Carnival. But en route to Venice, Clara shed in Europe, she realised that the rhino pictured should be her horn. Clara and the crowds that queued to see her – capable of being identified as one of those eight. So began even in her hornless state – are recorded in the paintings and the research that led to publication of Clara’s Grand Tour: etchings of the father and son, Pietro and Alessandro Longhi. Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Atlantic Books, 2004), and winner of the Institute of Historical This paper will provide a brief introduction to Clara’s history Research Prize. and mid-eighteenth century European odyssey, before examining her 1751 visit to Venice. At that time, the fragility of Clara’s status as the only one of her kind in Europe was further heightened by her shed horn, while rumors that she had been lost to the Grand Canal may be seen as an astute marketing ploy on the part of Van der Meer, and strangely prescient of the potential disappearance of both the rhinoceros and Venice itself.

For more https://louisville.edu/english/people/ current-faculty-new/glynis-ridley Clara in Qatar: the 14.45 story of a Meissen porcelain

Sophie Bostock Biography

Curator, Prints and Drawings, Sophie Bostock is Curator of Prints and Drawings at Orientalist Museum, Qatar the Orientalist Museum, part of Qatar Museums, in Doha. She obtained her PhD in 2010 at the University of Warwick, The Orientalist Museum in Qatar has a small, but important, The Pictorial Wit of Domenico Tiepolo, on the Pulcinella Meissen porcelain statue of a rhinoceros. This rhino is none drawings of Domenico Tiepolo. Sophie formerly worked other than Clara, the same rhinoceros which toured Venice in as Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Barber 1751 and which is represented in the two famous paintings Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham University. by Pietro Longhi. This short intervention will introduce this further representation of Clara, and its provenance and highlight the ongoing travels of Miss Clara.

Rhinoceros, Meissen porcelain, OM.1000, National Collection of Qatar Photography ©National Collection of Qatar Rhino horns and scraps of 15.00 unicorn: The sense of touch and the consumption of rhino Horns in early modern Iberia

Bruno Martinho continuous demand for rhino horns despite scholarly attempts to demonstrate their medical uselessness. In the same way European University Institute that touching holy relics were believed to trigger divine and CHAM – Centre for the intervention, touching rhino horns was mandatory if the latter’s properties were to be released. Eventually, touching became Humanities, Lisbon also a manifestation of the consumer’s capacity to control those processes. Therefore, it is not surprising that rhino horns Around 1570, the Spanish ambassador in Lisbon asked a became integrated in court ceremonial as a prerogative of Portuguese physician for a medical opinion about a rhino princes and higher nobility. horn that had just been brought from overseas. The reply, essentially an analysis of the prophylactic properties of the item, was written when European scholars were trying to Biography understand if the rhinoceros was the same animal that both Bruno A. Martinho is a PhD researcher at the European contemporary Asian sources and Classical authors described University Institute, in Florence. His research focuses on as a one-horned beast living in North India which had great the consumption of non-European objects in the Iberian powers – a unicornus. Peninsula during the second half of the sixteenth century. He is also a member of CHAM – the Portuguese Centre for The reply of the Portuguese physician is the departure Global History, in Lisbon. From 2010-2014, Martinho was point to demonstrate that the consumption of rhino horns Curator at Palácio Nacional de Pena, in Sintra. Previously, in early modern Iberia is a more complex phenomenon than he worked as Documentation Officer for the Ministry of has hitherto been accepted. Rather than a vague interest Education in Portugal. Martinho completed a first degree in in exotic items, its alleged prophylactic properties were History at the University of Lisbon (2002-2006), an MA in probably the main reason feeding consumption. However, Museum Studies at University College London (2006-2007), the phenomenon also needs to include other factors, such as and a second MA in Art History at NOVA University in Lisbon the activity of merchants and dealers who had learned how (2007-2010). His interest in museums led him to participate to exploit the beliefs in the power of that material. in two summer schools at the École du Louvre in Paris (2008; 2016) and to organise an international workshop about In this paper, I focus on the importance of the sense of touch curating History (Florence, 2017). in contemporary culture in order to explain why there was a

For more https://eui.academia.edu/ BrunoMartinho Gigi Bon: her oeuvre, her 16.00 wünderkammer, and how Venice became a rhino

Catherine Kovesi (with Gigi Bon)

To enter the Studio d’Arte ‘Mirabilia’ of Venetian artist Gigi Bon is to be introduced to a world of sculptures, prints, and objects of wonder in the tradition of the sixteenth-century wünderkammer or Cabinet of Curiosities. But more than this, it is an entrée into the mind and active working studio of an artist who has a unique vision, developed over more than twenty-five years, of the profound links between her own identity, that of the city of Venice, and the predicament of the rhinoceros. Gigi’s vision, indeed, was a core inspiration for this symposium and exhibition. This presentation will introduce Gigi Bon herself, and her artistic oeuvre, which incorporates elements of the precious, the rare, the fantastical, and the whimsical.

For more http://www.gigibonvenezia.com/ Shih Li-Jen: his oeuvre, and 16.30 his vision of the rhino and unfettered consumption

Sabrina Ardizzoni In this paper on the unique production of Shih Li-Jen, I will concentrate in particular on the select group of works University of Bologna chosen for this exhibition in Venice. Among them, one is a constant feature of all his exhibitions: a horn covered in The rhinoceros is emblematic of our dominance over nature: blood surrounded by the banknotes of all the countries a sacred animal in archaic China, and hugely symbolic of the responsible, directly or indirectly, for the crime of the rhino’s African Weldt, it is defeated only in its unequal struggle with extermination. humans, heedless of international law in their greed. Shih Li-jen, a Taiwanese sculptor based in Taiwan, has chosen rhinoceroses as the focal point of his artistic enquiry. Mr. Biography Rhino’s compact with the rhinoceros has been ongoing for Sabrina Ardizzoni is Adjunct Professor in Chinese language twenty years. “My goal is creating rhino sculptures to inspire and culture at the University of Bologna. She is a professional people to help save these creatures”, he says. translator and interpreter and has published various materials on Chinese language and culture. She is interested After having studied its biological features with the zeal of in contemporary Chinese art as a cultural expression and a Victorian naturalist and investigating its presence in the believes that the anthropological researcher can find good iconography of various civilisations, Shih has developed an companions in artists’ worlds. A graduate of the University artistic language of his own, through which, by the use of of Bologna, where she has been teaching since 2003, different materials, including precious ones, he endeavours Ardizzoni’s particular relationship with China began in 1992, to enunciate the spiritual meanings infused in this creature. when she began to travel all over China, from her base in Geometric shapes, and external elements of technological Beijing. She met Shih Li-Jen in in 2013 in Found Museum, in and industrial derivation mark the evolution of his work No.1 Art Base in Beijing. Since then she has been fascinated from a rigorous realism to aesthetically modern shapes by his passionate research on rhinoceroses and the historical fraught with a complex symbology. The signature of all his and ecological meaning they bear. representations is the engraved horn: a raised thumb with a universal fingerprint.

For more http://li-jen-shih.artparks.co.uk/

https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/ sabrina.ardizzoni/en For more, including registration links, contact information and location details, please visit our event website: emporium.org.au/ rhinovenice